For this General review, I have selected five exciting books dealing with religion. I am very happy to report that we now find selected papers of Robert Parker, one of the luminaries in the field of Greek religion, in a handsomely produced and affordable volume published in the Kernos Suppléments series, whose many virtues I have often extolled on these pages.1 The collection contains twenty articles published over the span of thirty-five years, and, in a way, provides the ‘best of’ of Parker's opera minora. But these are minora in name only: all articles gathered in this volume have been, and remain, highly influential and represent question-defining studies that shaped the way we think about discrete problems in Greek religion.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (July 2023–July 2024) gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.

Writing in the first century ce, Columella delineates farming practice based on personal experience and observation. Roman attitudes towards slavery, truth, and torture are highlighted in a particularly graphic description of preparing the soil for sowing.

The Charles Keck reliefs on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, portray the triumph of white settlers over Native Americans, who are depicted as stereotypically aggressive and ‘barbaric’. Keck's sculptures invite comparison to the metopes of the Parthenon, which depict the triumph of Greek and Athenian ‘civilization’ over ‘barbarism’. The central focus of Keck's reliefs is Fortitude, an allegorical figure whose image throughout art history is indebted to depictions of Athena and Minerva, and who serves for the Nelson-Atkins as a modern American proxy for the Athenian goddess. As the Periclean building programme proclaimed Athenian superiority and had long-term cultural and economic impacts for Athens, the Nelson-Atkins is intimately connected to the economic and urban development of Kansas City, including its history of racist real estate practices, engineered by a founding trustee of the museum, which became a national model.

In the books reviewed there is a cumulative resistance to the normative discourse, shifting our attention away from the centre and to the margins. This might mean listening to marginalized women, from the poets themselves to characters in poetry, or people today who relate to those female characters’ experiences. It might mean pushing beyond spatial boundaries and encountering dislocation and disjunction in the hazy hinterland of the non-elite. It might mean moving the human to one side, so that nature and the nonhuman can come to the fore (and teach us about what it means to be human, along the way). These books give voice to suppressed groups including women, animals, and the land. They highlight axes of oppression, and give us tools to shift the balance of power: from the language we use to the way we relate to the world around us. And with stories of prophetic horses, sympathetic lions, and pensive pigs, their interpretations – as well as the classical tales they recount – are not to be missed!